Puppet’s codedir is the main directory for Puppet code and data. It contains environments (which contain your manifests and modules), a global modules directory for all environments, and your Hiera data.

When Puppet is running as either root, a Windows user with administrator privileges, or the puppet user, it will use a system-wide codedir. When running as a non-root user, it will use a codedir in that user’s home directory.

The system codedir is what you usually want to use, since you will usually run Puppet’s commands and services as root or puppet. (Note that admin commands like puppet module must be run with sudo to use the same codedir as Puppet agent or Puppet master.)

Note: When Puppet master is running as a Rack application, the config.ru file must explicitly set --codedir to the system codedir. The example config.ru file provided with the Puppet source does this.

Configuration

The location of the codedir can be configured in puppet.conf with the codedir setting, but note that Puppet Server doesn’t use that setting; it has its own jruby-puppet.master-code-dir setting in puppetserver.conf. If you’re using a non-default codedir, you must change both settings.

Interpolation of $codedir

Since the value of the codedir is discovered before other settings, you can safely reference it (with the $codedir variable) in the value of any other setting in puppet.conf: